Tiptree erotica
Started to include this in previous entry, decided it would be a mistake. So, one more entry this morning, and then I'm really off to do magazine stuff.
In spare moments before bed and while waking up, I've been reading Meet Me at Infinity, subtitled "The Uncollected Tiptree: Fiction and Nonfiction." Edited by Jeffrey D. Smith. Published by Orb (Tor) in a nice trade paperback edition in 2001.
Some of it is pretty minor work, but I'm interested in Tiptree/Sheldon the person as well as in her work, so it's worth reading. I'll probably talk more about it when I finish the book. (But it may take me a while to finish it, given that it apparently includes some of her musings about death and suicide—for those who don't know, she ended up killing herself and her husband, I think after they both became ill.)
But for now, I wanted to comment on one particular story: "Trey of Hearts."
I was surprised at the story; it's very explicitly sexual, much more so than anything else I'd read by Tiptree. Even though it's definitely science fiction, it reminded me in various ways (tone, voice, even to some degree subject matter) of the autobiographical erotica in Lonnie Barbach's seminal (ahem) 1984 anthology Pleasures. And then I got to the end of the story and read the editorial note. Turns out that Barbach asked Tiptree to write something for Pleasures; Tiptree ended up declining, but Barbach invited her to write for Pleasures II a couple years later. (I haven't read the latter volume, but I gather it was a fiction anthology, unlike the former.) So Tiptree wrote this story. Barbach said it was too long, and asked for a lot of cuts; Tiptree declined to make the cuts, so the story remained unpublished until the present volume.
As sf erotica goes, the story's not brilliant. But it's good, and charming, and sexy, and well worth reading. And, I think, kind of remarkable for something written twenty years ago; I don't think much of this kind of thing was being written back then. Though I could well be wrong.
Anyway. I didn't want to include this stuff in the previous entry because I figured it would only muddy the waters; there are enough people as it is who conflate queer sf with erotica. But I'll certainly be mentioning the story on the panel, even though it's not exactly queer in the usual current sense of the word. (There are two beings who are wearing temporary human male bodies involved in the sex scenes, but they're known to be aliens from the start.)
Best line from the story (Bolingbroke is the human name taken by one of the aliens-in-human-form):
"How splendid!" exclaims Bolingbroke. "When we learned that we must wait here for so long [...], we determined to experience some major Terran activity. So we decided on sex. Would you say it is a major Terran activity?"
Somehow that line reminds me of Phil Foglio's Xxxenophile. —But I should note that the Tiptree story overall is not as silly as that quote may suggest.
